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Sun’s Plans

It is an interesting idea, essentially giving away hardware in exchange for signing long-term service agreements, trading hardware margins for service margins. I hope it works, really, but I doubt that it will. And the reason it is likely to fail is Schwartz’s glib lack of understanding of his own people, who will tend to resist this change even if it means the death of their company.
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Applications can be moved to faster servers, to multiprocessor servers, and ultimately to clusters of servers working together. But unless your application was designed to be distributed, the return in added application power from each added processor decreases until at eight processors or so it often isn’t worth adding any more machines to the grid. Google can do it, sure. Google can cooperatively run tens of thousands of servers, dividing among them a single task, but what makes Google different from you or me is that company’s 1000+ computer scientists who built the massively distributed system and keep it running.